Every parent believes his or her childhood days were harder but better than that of their children, and thinks their children don’t know of the hardships and difficulties they had suffered. And for the same reason they conclude that the children miss the joy and ecstasy of childhood too.
My father used to tell me that I had not had the difficulties he had had in his childhood days. I tell my daughter she doesn’t face any of the difficulties or scarcities I had experienced in my childhood. When my father used to tell me the childhood difficulties of his generation, it used to infuriate me to listen; but I did not have the courage to express my irritation. But whenever I tell my nine-year-old daughter that she enjoys amenities that I could not even dream of in my childhood, she is infuriated, and she expresses it too!
My father was a small farmer. I am a government employee and I am greatly indebted to my father for having made me what I am today. And I always tell my little daughter, who is in Class 4, whenever she demands a costly dress or similar things, that I used to have new dresses only once in a year — for Onam. And in my childhood there was no television, cellphone or iPad. Her demand for Onam this year was to have an iPad. I bought one, and she virtually celebrated the Onam vacation on it! She downloaded numbers of games and forever played on the tablet.
And I kept telling her: “This is not celebrating Onam; this is celebrating the gadgets and being a slave to them. I have not celebrated Onam like this.”
When my lambasting started becoming too irksome to tolerate, she asked me to tell her how I used to celebrate Onam in my childhood.
“Today,” I started, “We have to buy everything. We have no vegetables like the elephant yam or pumpkin or ash-guard or peas, and we have no flowers to pluck for the floral designs. But in my childhood we cultivated every vegetable needed for Onam and we have had all kinds of flowers in our courtyard and everywhere. We used to pluck flowers from the roadside, from our home gardens and compounds. And the children of the whole neighbourhood mingled and played together instead of sitting inside their respective homes.”
“Dad,” my daughter asked me, “Wasn’t my grandfather a farmer?”
“Of course,” I answered. Then she said: “It was the duty of a farmer to cultivate vegetables. And in your childhood, as you yourself tell me time and again, there were spacious compounds and home gardens, and flowers bloomed even along the roads. And as there was virtually no traffic, you were allowed to go far and wide to pluck flowers. But now we have to buy every vegetable, because you are not a farmer like your father and you cultivate nothing in our compound and we have no compound either. And will you allow me to go outside and pluck flowers if I wished to? And will you let me go out and mingle with the children of the neighbourhood and play? Even if you allow me to, will the other children be allowed to?”
She looked into my eyes and I couldn’t answer her. And she continued: “In your childhood days there were no iPads or smartphones. But now in my childhood, they are there; and my father can afford to have them for me and I will have them. Your father was a farmer, but my father is a government employee and I am a ‘new-gen’ kid.”
I was dumbfounded as she put the tablet in my hands and went to watch her favourite cartoon programme on TV, asking me to have the device charged by the time she returned after watching it!
lscvsuku@gmail.com
